Monday, June 10, 2013

Steve Jobs: The Digital Acid Trip

Given the attention Walter Isaacson's biography has deservedly
received from media — reviews, excerpts, Isaacson appearing on talk shows — you
are likely familiar with many of Steve Jobs's quirks, oddities, and
peccadilloes. You may know Jobs drove around without license plates and
routinely parked in handicapped spaces, that he went on strict fruit and
vegetable diets, that he studied Zen, and that, as a youth, he cultivated an
intense persona one friend from those days described as "oscillating
between charismatic and creepy."

You may also have heard that when he was sixteen, he and his
best buddy, Steve Wozniak [aka Woz], an engineering mastermind with a madcap
streak, put together what they called a Blue Box that could generate the
AT&T tones needed to dial any number they liked. They placed one such call
to the Vatican, with Woz posing as Henry Kissinger. Woz said: "Ve are at
de summit meeting in Moscow, and ve need to talk to de pope." A bishop on
the other end eventually determined that the call was not coming from any
Moscow summit but from a pay phone, perhaps in California.

That particular stunt, as it happened, did not just leave
the pranksters laughing, much as the two Steves of Silicon Valley relished their
pranks. Jobs and Woz made a small business out of the Blue Boxes, putting 100
units together — each assembled out of $40 in parts — and selling them for $150
each. Jobs believed that experience laid the foundation for his whole career.
"If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn't have been an
Apple," Isaacson quotes him saying. "Woz and I learned to work
together and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems
and actually put something into production." Woz, who would co-found Apple
with Jobs, felt the same. "You cannot believe how much confidence that
gave us," he recalled. "It gave us a taste of what we could do."

Any number of such anecdotes spill out of the Isaacson's
bio. The author does not neglect the humorous side of the Jobs story. Here,
however, is a tale that seems so out of any context it has not made the rounds.

In 1985, Jobs went to Moscow to promote technology. No, when
given a chance, he didn't compare Bill Gates to Joseph Stalin, though who's to
say the thought didn't cross his mind? After all, Apple's famed ad — shot by
Ridley Scott, coming off the success of "Blade Runner" — shown in
1984 at Super Bowl XVIII, touted the soon-to-be unveiled Macintosh as nothing
less than the force to topple Big Brother (aka IBM). (As the ad's announcer put
it: "On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll
see why 1984 won't be like '1984'". )

What Jobs did do, in Moscow, however, was reveal a
previously unspoken — and never repeated — enthusiasm for Leon Trotsky. This
did not endear him to his Soviet hosts. "At one point," writes
Isaacson, "the KGB agent assigned to him suggested he tone down his
fervor," bluntly telling Jobs: "You don't want to talk about
Trotsky". Jobs had many talents but toning down fervor was not among them.
When he met with computer students, he "began his speech by praising
Trotsky."

Why wax on about Trotsky in the most inhospitable place on
earth to do so? For that very reason, perhaps. To put it another way, being
Jobs, how could he not?

Aside from the praise the Isaacson bio has garnered, it has
also occasioned some strange misreading. Malcolm Gladwell, while calling the
book "enthralling" (The New Yorker, 11/14/11), refuses to credit
Isaacson's assertion that Jobs was a visionary. Instead, he cites a number of
obscure but topnotch English and Scottish engineers who fine-tuned elements of
the machinery that gave England its edge in the industrial revolution: Gladwell
categorizes them as "tweakers", and lumps Jobs in with them. Jobs was
a tweaker too.

However mightily they tweaked, posterity seems to have lost
track of them, whereas it's hard to imagine Jobs being dropped from pride of
place in the annals, at least, of computer history. And there's the not
inconsiderable fact that Jobs did not succeed by virtue of superior engineering
chops: when he ran Apple the aesthetic of design, as he refined it, dictated to
the engineers, who often squawked, said it was impossible, then engineered the
impossible. What needs a good stiff tweak here is Gladwell's pedanticism, his
inability to grasp the many-sided personality — designer, futurist, marketer,
artist, media-maven, game changer, celebrity, and, oh yes, pain in the ass —
that emerges from Isaacson's pages.

Nor does Gladwell get that when it comes to computers, we
are all end users. The "clean sheet of paper" that is all the equipment
Gladwell thinks a real visionary needs as he "re-imagines" the world
is simply not to be found in a sequence that includes Boolean algebra, binary
arithmetic, Turing machines, Von Neumann bottlenecks, quantum mechanics,
transistors, integrated circuits, mainframes, minis, personal computers, DARPA,
Multix, Unix, the Internet, the World Wide Web, C++, the iPhone, and Google.

Was Jobs a tweaker? If Thomas Edison was, when he tweaked
electrons, or Ted Williams when he hit .406. Indeed, couldn't it be argued that
Hemingway but tweaked the novel, and that, at bottom, Shakespeare only tweaked
tragedy, comedy, and, when in the mood, the sonnet? Isaac Newton said: "If
I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Was he
saying that he had tweaked thermodynamics?

Not that I mean to compare Jobs's accomplishments to those
of a Shakespeare or Newton — or Einstein, the subject of a previous bio by
Isaacson. Jobs is not in that company, nor ever dreamed that he was. It
matters, though, that he was capable of being inspired by their kind. J. Robert
Oppenheimer, for example, was a role model. "I read about the type of
people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was,
but that's what I aspired to do [for Apple]." Yes, it's jarring to compare
the Manhattan Project to the graphical user interface, but also indicative of
Jobs's gift for defying boundaries, slipping between contexts, and intuiting
commonality. Jobs loved Bauhaus design, Kyoto gardens, and Tiffany Glass — taking
the Macintosh team with him to a Tiffany retrospective to prove you could make
"great art that could be mass-produced" — much as he loved the serif
and sans serif typefaces that the bit-mapped Macintosh brought to home
computers. Neither Jobs's sensibility nor his kind of ambition can be
shoehorned, without procrustean reduction, into Gladwell's rubric of
"tweaker".

Another way of accounting for Steve Jobs's success is
humorously summarized and dispatched by Tom McNichol in his "Be a Jerk:
The Worst Business Lesson From the Steve Jobs Biography" (the Atlantic,
December, 2011). McNichol suggests that the next, generation of business books
will sport titles like, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Assholes,"
and "The One-Minute Asshole". He quotes research showing that the new
big idea among "a disconcerting number of Silicon Valley leaders" is
the conviction that "Steve Jobs was living proof that being an asshole
boss was integral to building a great company." McNichol does not subscribe
to this view. "The fact is, Steve Jobs didn't succeed because he was an
asshole," he writes. "He succeeded because he was Steve Jobs."

Still: how to account for being Steve Jobs? Isaacson's
multi-threaded book does not settle for any one explanation; it allows for
many, including some that are highly critical of Jobs. Throughout his career,
Jobs ordained that Apple make closed machines, at one point devising
"special tools so that the Macintosh case could not be opened with a
regular screwdriver." Keeping the literal lid on, much as Jobs insisted on
it, was secondary to ensuring a perfect fit between Apple's propriety operating
system and its hardware. There is no doubt that in the end this gave Apple the
edge in the design of the desktop computer, the laptop, and mobile devices,
forcing others in the field, again and again, to play catch-up. But there were
times when it seemed Apple might perfect itself out of business. Bill Gates got
in a good one against Jobs when he quipped: "His product comes with an
interesting feature called incompatibility".

Confronted with Jobs's famed temper, Gates proved to be a
cool counterpuncher. As is well known, Jobs got the idea for a mouse-driven
graphic interface from a visit to a Xerox lab, where these innovations were in
the works. Nor did he deny it, recalling: "It was like a veil being lifted
from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to
be." When Microsoft decided to launch Windows, its own GUI — which for
many years, to Mac users, looked like a decayed version of the Apple OS, like
Apple with Hansen's disease — Jobs was outraged, screaming at Gates in a
Cupertino showdown: "I trusted you and now you're stealing from us!"
Blinking a few times, Gates, in his "squeaky voice" calmly replied: "Well
Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more
like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to
steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

Score one for Gates. But his riposte leaves room for doubt.
It's easy to imagine Gates breaking into Xerox and ignoring the TV, or
thinking, if it were on: cute — those icons, that mouse — but what does this
have to do with computing? The veil that fell at once from Jobs's eyes might
have remained over Gates's indefinitely — or precisely until the Macintosh
eliminated all doubt about the future of computing. Here, I take my cue from
Jobs, who said of Gates: "He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid
once." I'm suggesting that if Jobs is to be shoehorned, he might as well
be shoehorned into a tab of LSD.

No doubt too much can be made out of Jobs's tripped-out
youth, but also, too little. Jobs himself said: "Definitely, taking LSD is
one of the most important things in my life." He never recanted when it
came to psychedelics, or disowned their influence. In 1980, after Apple had
gone public, he spoke to a class of Stanford business students and after
submitting to a dull and predictable barrage of questions about the worth of Apple
stocks he asked: "How many of you are virgins? How many of you have taken
LSD?" (It was a Steve Jobs version of Jimmy Hendrix singing: "Are you
experienced? Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful".)

It wasn't just isolated acid trips that shaped Jobs; it was
the unique set and setting afforded by the Bay area culture of his youth.
Isaacson writes:

"In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley. . There
was a hacker subculture — filled with wire heads, phreakers, cyberpunks . . .
There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD;
participants included Doug Engelbart. . . who later helped develop the computer
mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken Kesey, who celebrated the drug
with music-and-light shows featuring a house band that became the Grateful
Dead."

Jobs never failed to credit the formative, boundary buckling power of that culture. "There was
something going on here," he told Isaacson. "The best music came from
here — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin — and so
did the integrated circuit."

LSD and other psychedelics excite, magnify and sometimes
derange the senses. They can make sound visible — the most common synesthetic
effect — and colors audible. The veil was ready to fall from Jobs's eyes when
he visited Xerox: here was a computer built on graphics — monochrome at first,
but not for long, the ability to produce thousands of hues arriving soon
enough. Here, with the mouse, was a way of interacting with that computer
physically, rather than alphabetically, by tortuously typing easily misspelled
chains of commands (often, back then, in heartless green characters on a
joyless black screen). It's not absurd to see Jobs's whole career — from the
underpowered, overpriced and completely revolutionary Macintosh on through
Pixar, iTunes and the iPhone — as an effort to ground expanded senses in
technology. And then there are his product announcements. Isaacson writes:
"With the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs had created a new
kind of theater: the product debut as an epochal event." It's not too much
of a stretch to call these the Cupertino correlate to Fillmore West light show.
Bono once complimented Jobs's devotion to design by saying: "The job of
art is to chase ugliness away." (Bono also called Jobs Apple's "lead
singer".)

Would Gates, breaking into Xerox, know what was worth
stealing? Quite possibly, given lack of psychedelic/countercultural coaching,
nope.

Jobs's life is not altogether triumphant. For one thing, he
died young, at 56. And his death leaves much to dwell on. Despite urging from
family, he put off surgery on his pancreatic cancer for nine months. (His body
was a Macintosh for which no one, in his view, had the approved screwdriver.)
In the interim, he saw psychics, masseuses, herbalists, acupuncturists. He
fasted and drank carrot juice.

Would surgery, shortly after the diagnosis of cancer, have
saved him? Doctors debate this, some saying it was the type of malignancy that
would have already have spread to the liver and beyond, others arguing it was an
"indolent" cancer, susceptible to surgical intervention. It's notable
that none of the psychics, acupuncturists, or herbalists Jobs consulted are on record
expressing comparable doubts about themselves or disagreements with each other.
Did any of them say, were any capable of saying: look, Steve, we think you have
a better shot with surgery. Did they heal/help him? Or did they just help him
die?

Then there are the last words of Steve Jobs. Einstein, dying,
asked for his pencil, as if in his final moments the Old One would vouchsafe
the equation he had been seeking for decades, the one that would undo quantum
mechanics. Richard Feynman said: "This dying is boring".